I fell down a rabbit hole recently. Despite trying to convince myself that I had collected enough literature to be able to start writing my new book on women’s leadership and burnout in higher education, I read this article in the Harvard Business Review about passion for work and had to track down the study by Robert J. Vallerand and colleagues that inspired it (which then led to reading a chunk of the research on passion at work). In that study, “On the Role of Passion for Work in Burnout: A Process Model,” the authors argue that past research on burnout cannot “explain why, in the same environment, one individual is thriving whereas another one is experiencing burnout symptoms” (p. 290).
Beyond the Credential Factory: Why Higher Education Must Shift from Management to Flourishing
For decades, higher education leadership has obsessed over “student success” as a purely operational metric. We track retention and graduation rates and postgraduation outcomes with the same linear precision that
Yoshitaka Iwasaki
August 3, 2026
